Sunday, September 20, 2015

How Image Comics Have Left Marvel and DC For Dust

This is the
current list of Image titles I read: Bitch Planet, Chew, Descender, The Fade
Out, Lazarus, The Manhattan Projects, Saga, Sex Criminals, Southern Bastards,
Velvet, We Stand On Guard.This is the
current list of Marvel titles I read: Avengers, Ms. Marvel, Star Wars, Thor.This is the
current list of DC titles I read: Batman.In truth I
have never been a big DC reader, except for the Vertigo imprint towards the end
of its heyday. But I’ve always been a big Marvel fan, and now Image has well
overtaken it.In part this
is because Marvel is now eating itself with its constant stream of re-treads
and re-launches. Image though now has it beat for creativity hands down, and
has for some time.Marvel
started off the century well, with its best stretch of titles since the ‘80s –
including New X-Men, X-Force/X-Statix, the Ultimate line of comics, Brian
Michael Bendis’ and Alex Maleev’s Daredevil, and Ed Brubaker’s Captain America.
But Marvel just can’t get away from its roots as a superhero line. Even when it
tried to branch out into other genres, such as Bendis’ detective-based Alias
series, it still had to implant the story in its superhero universe.Not that
this necessarily has to be a bad thing. However Image Comics have now become
the home for creators to launch their pet projects – top writers such as Jason
Aaron, Ed Brubaker, Kelly DeConnick, Matt Fraction, Jonathan Hickman, Greg
Rucka, and Brian K. Vaughan – in tow with great artists such as Steve Epting,
Sean Phillips, and Fiona Staples, as well as heretofore relative unknowns such
as Chew’s team of John Layman and Rob Guillory. And of course, while I don’t
read it regularly (preferring to wait for the omnibuses), there is Robert
Kirkman’s The Walking Dead.Marvel’s top
creators, the ‘architects’ as they are termed by the company itself (many of
whom cross over with Image’s line-up of creators), are good at what they do,
but all they can do really is play with the same worn-out sandbox and come up
with slightly off-the-wall Avengers line-ups. Image is the home to the fresh new
concepts. They play well to my twelve-issue theory; that is, that comic book
series are at their ‘hottest’ for their first twelve issues before the concept
starts to become stale. (See for example American Flagg, Animal Man, Astro
City, Bone, Hawkeye, Incredible Hercules, Madman Comics, Planetary, Powers,
Stray Bullets, and so on ...) It’s comics’ equivalent of the debut rock album.Image’s
current place used to be taken by DC’s Vertigo. One by one though the series
that made Vertigo the ‘HBO of comics’ – Sandman, Preacher, Transmetropolitan,
100 Bullets, and finally Hellblazer and Fables – have ended, without anything
substantial enough or (semi-)popular enough to replace them. If Vertigo were
the HBO of comics, perhaps Image are the AMC.It seems a
little strange that the company which started off in the 1990s with mostly
flashy, but god-awfully written titles should come to be the highest quality of
the ‘big three’ companies. A lot of credit seems to go to current publisher Eric Stephenson. Stephenson’s own Age of Bronze
series was somewhat acclaimed, and along with Astro City and Powers started to
move Image away from its X-Men clones and towards more diverse, more thoughtful
titles. He seems to be even better though as a talent-spotter or at least a
facilitator for good creators and their work.Also Image
is probably not that concerned with selling movies or toys.Don’t get me wrong: Image is hardly selling high
literature here. Even Saga and The Walking Dead are just well-developed genre
pieces. But as far as doing really good genre work, which is what ‘mainstream’
comics at their best do as well as any medium, Image is currently streets
ahead.